Science Fiction Though the Decades

Monday, February 10, 2014

2007: Rollback (Sawyer, Robert J.)

A cheese platter of pop
culture and author indulgence (2/5)

In 2009, I read my first Robert J. Sawyer novel—Calculating God
(2000)—which I enjoyed for its plethora of science yet panned for its
stereotypes and a laundry list of annoyances: “near-millennial pop-culture references, science fiction
trivia, extensive homage paid to the late Carl Sagan and facts surrounding the
real Royal Ontario Museum”. Little did I know, Rollback
would gather these same elements around an entirely different plot; yet,
regardless of the who, what, when, where and why of the plot, the entire novel
feels like a paint by numbers novel—a pushover, an easy read.

Rear
cover synopsis:

“Dr.
Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens
thirty-eight years ago. Now, a second message is received, and Sarah, not
eighty-seven, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too… if she lives long
enough.

A
wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback—a hugely
expensive rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on the condition that Don, her
husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making
him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for
Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.

While
Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between
him and his wife, Sarah heroically struggles to figure out what a signal from
the stars contains before she dies.”

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It
has long been thought that the first message from an alien race would be the
passing of information vital to bootstrap the human race into technological
perfection, to provide all of humankind’s questions with a simple yet benevolent
heaven-sent answer. However, the first message was anything but.

March
1st, 2009: Earth’s first reception of an alien message via SETI. The
enormous packet of data sent from Sigma Draconis II is encoded by a decimal number
system, which is gradually decoded by numerous experts around the work. The
first part of the message establishes a common grammar for the second part of
the message which defeats the world’s greatest minds… until Sarah Halifax
stumbles upon the answer to the deciphering while playing Scrabble with her
husband; the feat wins her brief worldwide fame. More importantly, the
resulting information is discovered to be a survey of eighty-four question
regarding morals and ethics:

A series of questions, most of which are multiple choice,
laid out like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, with space for a thousand
different people to provide their answers to each question. The aliens clearly
want a cross section of our views, and they went to great pains to establish a
vocabulary for conveying value judgments and dealing with matters of opinion,
with sliding scales for precisely quantifying responses. (100)

Of
the 1,206,343 anonymous responses to the questionnaire via internet, 999 are
randomly selected to be sent back to the alien source with the inclusion of one
additional response: that of Dr. Sarah Halifax. The 18.8 light-year distance to
Sigma Draconis II means that humanity will not receive a return signal for at
least another 37 years. Meanwhile, the humans go about their terrestrial lives
doing terrestrial things such as playing Scrabble, watching Seinfeld and
buying DVDs of old Canadian TV series.

February
2nd, 2048: Earth’s second reception of a signal from Sigma Draconis
II. Sarah Halifax, celebrating her sixtieth wedding anniversary at the ripe age
of eighty-seven, is called on to decipher the message yet again. The bulk of
the message is unreadable yet is confirmed to have been sent by the same aliens
which sent the initial message as they used a unique identifier, a fact kept
secret from everyone on Earth. Cody McGavin, the superbly wealthy business
owner and financer of SETI, calls upon Sarah because he believes that the
enormous distance of signaling between civilizations is not a conversation
between the same civilizations, but between individuals: the one alien and the
one human transceivers. To facilitate this belief, opposing Sagan’s rhetorical
question “Who speaks for the Earth?” (144), McGavin offers the most sacred of
gifts to Sarah: near immortality.

The
gift of near immortality comes in the form or a “rollback” procedure, from the Rejuvenex
company, which starts “with a full-body scan, cataloging
problems that would have to be corrected:
damaged joints, partially clogged arteries, and more” (58) and entails a
repair to their DNA, with “trillions of somatic cells” being repaired while “lengthening
the telomeres” (59). The procedure costs billions of dollars and only a few
wealthy people could afford the process of restoring their body clock to the
age of twenty-five or so.

With
the passing of their recent sixtieth anniversary, Sarah and Don look forward to
spending another sixth years of marriage together. With the procedure complete,
Sarah and Don notice no immediate effects but the checkups performed by
Rejuvenex’s doctors reveal that, while Don’s rollback is progressing nicely,
Sarah’s own rollback hasn’t started, leaving her at the physically frail age of
an octogenarian yet her mind is still sharp as a tack.

Without
the buzzing susurrus of his body’s aging pains, Don’s rejuvenation unveils the
cobwebbed senses of youth: vim and vigor, hope and ambition, and, most notably,
the stirring juices of sexual attraction—the feeling of being attractive
and attracted. Unable to squelch his new-found stallion lust with his fragile
wife, Don finds ample opportunity at the university where Sarah used to work.
His errand of fetching her “contact” papers allows him to contact a
particularly pulchritudinous redheaded graduate student who lures him into her
bed… without a sign of physical struggle or mental anguish.

Ignorant
of his trysts yet slowly realizing the ramifications of his rejuvenation,
doddering Sarah eventually falls and can’t get up because philandering Don
isn’t there to assist her. She asks filthy rich Cody McGavin, of McGavin
Robotics, for a robot assistant to help her at home while Don is dipping his
wick elsewhere. Able to cook, serve, chauffer and ambulate Sarah, the robot,
which they name Gunter, becomes an essential part of their family. They invest
their trust in the machine which is concerned for their well-being and is
always hovering around Sarah to facilitate her every whim and aid in her
memory.

Meanwhile,
Sarah toils at home trying to decipher the recent signal from Sigma Draconis
II. Across the world, those with original copies of the transmission are
correlating that data with the recent set and even amateurs are taking futile
stabs at cracking the code. She thinks, perhaps, that one set of answers from
the original questionnaire may unlock the transmission, but the eighty-four
sets are unable to unscramble the code; attempting to unlock it with all
possible variations of answers from the questionnaire would result in 2 × 1039 unique answer sets, which is even beyond
the capability of supercomputers in the year 2048.

Increasingly
physically feeble, Sarah expends her last joules of might to decipher the code,
alone in her strife at home and together with symposiums online. Revitalized
with youthful vigor, Don is also gifted with age-old wisdom thereby questioning
his own impetuous actions; his love for Scrabble and women one-third of his age
is eclipsed by his lifelong dedication to his dear wife, Sarah.

------------

I
have given thought about what the first, brief message from the stars would be:

Mars: “Mars
needs women.”

Tau
Centuri: “Hello?”

51
Pegasi: “Attachment not found.”

Vega: “Erectile
dysfunction?”

Pollox:
“LMAO.”

Capella:
“We request The Beatles.”

Aldebaran:
“This statement is false.”

Altair:
“What was I gonna say?”

Popular held opinion, as mentioned
in Rollback, is that aliens will bestow great knowledge to us because of
their advanced capabilities and age-old benevolence, a belief once held by Carl
Sagan: “Carl Sagan used to talk about us receiving an Encyclopaedia
Galactica” (100). Instead of answers, the aliens of Sigma Draconis II send
questions, questions of personal moral depth, all of which can be accomplished
by the lengthy primer which stems from mathematics. It’s a bit beyond my mind
or belief how you go from “[Question] 2+3 … [Answer] 5” (73) to “Is it acceptable
to prevent pregnancy when the population is low?” or “Is it acceptable to terminate
pregnancy when the population is high?” or “Is it all right for the state to execute
bad people?” (101).

I
can briefly suspend my belief (as a SF reader, this is rather precursory) for
the message, but the reply to our answers is borderline absurd. The surprising
content of the message may first be wow but the ramifications soon
dissolve the initial excitement to turgid interest and finally to the novel’s
epilogue with either flaccid disinterest or rigid revolt… the epilogue is
pretty, pretty cheesy—barely able to stomach as a matter of opinion.

Referring
to the “near-millennial
pop-culture references, science fiction trivia, extensive homage paid to the
late Carl Sagan and facts surrounding the real Royal Ontario Museum” mentioned
in the introduction, let me outline these eccentricities and others exhibited
by Sawyer in this novel, eccentricities which make the novel irksome, painful
to read. All these whims coalesce into one broad category of indulgence:

(a)
The book feels cheesy, hokey or
emphatically sarcastically cute. Passing whims include: the chimes of
Window’s OS opening theme, visiting outdated websites (Slashdot) on said computer, remembering television
shows of Canada’s past, buying DVDs of said television series, recollecting a
favorite Seinfeld episode, buying VHS and DVD movies, mentioning the
difference between Contact the book (1985) and Contact the movie
(1997), listening to an iPod, naming a robot from a memory of Lost in Space
(1965-1968), remembering watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, playing
The Sims game, mentioning a fictional glass artist who has the same name
as the book’s dedication: Robyn Herrington, etc.

(b)
Carl Sagan is mentioned seven times (pages 30, 55, 100, 103, 106, 144, 243),
which is strange because he isn’t a character in the novel. He may be one of
Sarah’s influences and one-time personal colleague, but why must he be so
prevalent? I don’t know why Sawyer is so obsessed with Sagan; he may have been
a great scientist and intellectual, but how does one find the gall to include
the man in such a mediocre novel?

(c) The gall/cheese factor is
ramped up when Don says, "One of my favorite authors once
said, 'Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large'", which is actually
a quote from Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment (1995).

(d)
Then there are a few hiccups which have no referential point and even after
research, I can’t pin down the reference; for example: “Pauli's
turned out to be a seafood restaurant, and even though Don loved John
Masefield's poetry, he hated seafood. Ah, well; doubtless the menu would have
some chicken or steak” (44). I thought maybe I had missed something or had
Sawyer simply stuck this in the story to be cute… well…

Aha,
it was another one of those “cute/clever” eccentric additions of Sawyer’s which
he thinks is pretty keen to include in his novel but really adds zero value to
the story… perhaps, negative value.

Aside
from the numerous eccentricities which distract the reader more than entertain
the reader, the novel is a no-brainer: predictable twists and predictable characters.
Including working full-time and two 8-hour periods of sleep, I finished this
book in a matter of 47 hours… not because it was engrossing, captivating or
intellectually stimulating, but because it read easily (more easily that A. A.
Attanasio’s Radix [1981], rather). You could say, it read so easily that
it was void of any engrossment, captivation or intellectual stimulation; “very
readable” does not equate to “very good”.

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I
guess if you want to read a quick book on a long flight and suffer indigestion
from the book’s content rather than the plane’s food, this might be for you.
Or, if you savor pop culture references and meaningless eccentricities, you
might enjoy every other word of this novel. I’m sad I still have Sawyer’s The
Hominids in my bookshelf… it might receive an early, thrusting boot from my
collection if it anything like this cheese platter called Rollback.

2 comments:

Sawyer is an author who really gets under my skin. His writing is the opposite of literary sci-fi, causing me to grit my teeth every time I see an award or nomination tossed his way. (The pop culture references, the predictable plot, the hand-holding, the characterization... you so rightfully point out are indeed irritating to no end.) And the immodest manner in which he self-promotes have daggers in my eyes. Like Brandon Sanderson, I find myself wonder: who reads this guy? And in answering the question I'm left depressed about the current state of the genre...

Hating the novel, I glanced at the (always unreliable) Amazon reviews and was surprised that many people rated the book 4- or 5-stars. I held out to the end and hated the book even more with the god-awful epilogue. I was left with a similar question to your "who reads this guy?"--"who likes this guy?"